Edouard Belin

Edouard Belin was a French photographer and inventor who developed one of the first practical systems for transmitting photographs over distance. In 1907 he invented the Belinograph, a phototelegraphic apparatus that scanned an original photograph point by point, measured light intensity at each point with an electric eye, and reproduced the image at a distant receiver using a matching light source and photographic paper, sending the result over telephone wires and telegraph networks. Newspapers began using the Belinograph to transmit photographs for publication from 1914 onward, and by 1921 Belin had refined the system to work over radio waves as well, letting images cross oceans faster than any courier. From 1926 he turned to developing television apparatus. The scanning and reconstruction principle behind the Belinograph is a direct ancestor of the modern fax machine and photocopier, which later replaced Belin's light sensor with solid state electronics while keeping the same basic operation.